Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

A Dark and Starry Night

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fairy-tale-moon-and-trees-copy

Fall is my favorite time of year. I may not like the winter waiting in the wings, except for the rare occasions that snow covers the ground. There is something mystical, though, about that period between when summer takes its last breaths before sliding into hibernation and the bitter winds and rain of winter make their entrance.

Something distinctly different happens on fall days that has nothing to do with the change of leaves, which here in Texas, we get very little of. Can you feel it? Day or, especially, night, something slips in with the cooler air to give a slight sheen to the light of day and the stars at night. I’m sure the scientists would remind me that the gigantic orange orb that hovers just above the horizon doesn’t happen only in autumn. Or is that why it’s called the harvest moon, because that’s the only time you see it? A moon so fleeting that it slips away into ordinary moon-ness in no time.

A dark and starry sky captures best my experience in my last class teaching at the Dallas County jail. We talked life stories and focused on events, happy and sad, that make up that life. We used Deborah Harding’s poem, “How I Knew Harold” which tells the story of a life in events in non-chronological order. As the female prisoners constructed their lives, there were many common themes of taking the wrong course, meeting and hanging out with the wrong people, turning to drugs to self-medicate against difficult situations.

The class wasn’t all seriousness. During the opening activity when each person compares her mood that night to food, one class participant characterized hers as ‘smashed peas.’ By the time she constructed her poem, she shared a hilarious story about her childhood. And another, a 60-year-old, told of her excitement at going to junior high school so she wouldn’t have to see the same 50 boys she’d known since first grade.

Most poignant of all was when a young woman of 27 related how the judge had told her he was giving her one last chance. One last precious chance to turn her life around after many missteps. For that moment, she seemed to value that chance and planned not to waste it. One bright star in the darkness. One moment of possible transition between the bleak and a sunny day.

I see those stories, happy and sad, as points of light, like the stars overhead when I left the jail a free woman, able to drive into the evening and go anywhere I pleased. Able to stand outside and breathe in the air of the in-between place of fall. Enjoying the different feel of it without exactly knowing why that was so.

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From Nightmares to Lemonade

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Scary Asylum Interior Background

I rarely remember my dreams, except for those that instill some sort of terror in me. Those nightmares come in three flavors. In one I find myself in an elevator taking me to the highest floor of a building. When I step out, that level is only a floor with no walls and I find myself clinging to it to keep from getting swept off by the wind or standing and plummeting over the edge. In the second scenario familiar to a lot of people, I’m in school, searching for the class I forgot to go to for the entire semester so I can take a final on the subject I probably know nothing about. And I’m not wearing pants.

The first in which I never think of getting back on the elevator, or maybe the elevator disappears, probably reflects my fear of heights or some subconscious insecurity. The second is that fear of something neglected or some subconscious insecurity, and the fact that I’m always questioning my clothing choices.

Earlier this year, I had that third type of dream, one I don’t have often. I was being chased by some seriously deranged killer wielding a knife while I hid in some unfamiliar house hoping to get away from him. That night, I took refuge in a closet while knife-man was skulking downstairs. As he got closer I started forcing myself to wake up, like swimming through thick syrup to bring myself to waking consciousness again. When I have those dreams, I often wake up feeling frightened and disoriented. That night was no different, but instead of dwelling on the dream and eventually slipping back into sleep, I started concocting a story.

What if the person hiding in the closet is listening to the murder of her philandering ex-boyfriend? What if the philandering ex-boyfriend cheated on her with her sister, and that same sister is doing him in for not being faithful to her? And what if somehow their mother is involved, the same mother who told the woman in the closet that she’d been responsible for taking out their philandering father by monkeying with his medications?

By the time I got back to sleep again about an hour later I had constructed the basics for the novel I finished this summer, a murder mystery propelled in many ways by the myriad social media outlets–#BadSister. The #BadSister hashtag has many connotations, and not what you might assume.

While I’m currently revising for future publication, I look at nightmares very differently. I can feel more comfortable now as I fall asleep at night. As much as I hope I don’t have a bad dream, I’ll never know what good might come out of the next one.

Have you ever had a creative project fueled by a nightmare?

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Summer’s Starry Skies

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Several years ago, in a rural area in Nicaragua, someone introduced me to the Milky Way. My guide to the universe, a professional photographer who just happened to be in that same area, pointed out what I’d never seen before—an arc of stars above my head. Maybe I never noticed that arc before that moment because I spend so much time amidst the light pollution of the city. Only with assistance and complete darkness did I realize I could visually observe the celestial neighborhood where my planet lives. The absence of light is what made those bodies so vibrant to me, helping them to reveal themselves to us earth-bound observers as they maintained the rough alignment of their orbits, as if we were looking at the side view of a very thick and luminescent plate.

The skies fascinate just about all of us, I’m sure. No matter where we live, in the city or a place of spectacular natural beauty, our eyes can always turn upwards. Earthly lights may obscure that view, except for that evening every year when cities turn off those lights to reveal what’s above. Proposals are regularly floated to minimize urban lights and the pollution they cause every night, especially during bird migration season. Aside from saving energy and birds in flight, relieving us from being denied the pleasure of the heavens is a good enough reason to take action.

Blinking Stars at Night

When I was a child, my grandparents lived on the outskirts of the city, far enough out of town that when the moon was new, my sister, cousin, and I could barely see our hands in front of our faces and each other playing nearby. Most evenings in summer we were treated to a view of a brilliant sky as we swung through the air on swings suspended from a rickety swing set in my grandparents’ back yard. That memory is the inspiration for this month’s Wendy Darling Bedtime Story.

It’s almost time to say goodbye to the nights of summer for this year. Not far behind are the spectacular harvest moons ushered in with autumn. Until that transition happens in a few more weeks, I’ll take each evening as an opportunity to venture out to see what summer skies remain and remember my childhood when those skies were filled with falling stars and wonder.

 

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Year’s Midnight to New Year’s Dawn

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Some years are more difficult than others – 365 day periods when loss piles upon loss, when challenges appear at every turn. In the aftermath, recollections of pleasant events, travels and new friends may be hidden among the difficult memories of those times. If we’re lucky, the year passes and we move into a more hopeful period.

2014 has been one of those years for me, one I compare to the year 2000. In both years, my spouse and I each lost a parent. Well-loved pets died, three this year and two in 2000. For my husband Ron and me, the challenges of caring for each of our aging parents meant time away from each other as we helped wrap up our parents’ affairs and held vigil at the bedside when they were both in hospice care. It fell to the other one to take care of household tasks.

In his poem, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” John Donne called the longest night in December, December 21, “the year’s midnight.” When I learned of this poem, and especially that designation for the longest night of the year, the term especially resonated for me. The celebration of St. Lucy is one of light amidst the darkness, especially for peoples in the northern-most part of Europe.

Stream in Shadows (Compressed - 2)Twice I have found in nature a balm for the bleakness. In the year 2000, Ron served as a Fulbright scholar in Chile which allowed us to travel this country of many countries–each of its five regions being distinct. A few days before we were about to leave for home, I found out that my father’s cancer had advanced and had become terminal. Our last trip in the country was to Chile’s lake region, a beautiful area south of the capital of Santiago. On our short visit, we’d both been disappointed as the lakes and volcanoes we’d come to see were obscured by a steady rain and thick fog as Chile’s winter approached. Near Lake Llanquihue, we stopped in a park and walked a path through a misty enclave surrounded by trees, the stones in the stream that ran through it illuminated by a bioluminescent and otherworldly green.

As we walked through that place showing signs of both life and death, the experience brought into focus that life-death cycle in a calming way, a way devoid of fear. I wished that my father could be there to experience it, too.

December MoonWhen we returned two years later during a Chilean summer of balmy weather and sunny skies, the volcano that had been so close to us as we walked that trail revealed itself. But as beautiful as the volcano was, the trail below it that I remembered had disappeared and in its place appeared a completely different one drenched in sunlight.

Early in the month of December of this year, two visions of the moon did their best to pull me back into that misty enclave. The moon appeared in a sky like I’d never remembered seeing, a sky at that point of blue turning to black and the full moon surrounded by a halo of light. The next night, after dark, I saw the moon through tree branches appearing to reach out for the lunar light. The branches belonged to a tree outside the house next door, once home to a neighbor who died just a few months before after a lengthy and debilitating illness. Both were life amidst the darkness, a sign of promise of a new day to come.

So I share this second moon with all who’ve passed and those of us left behind. We move into a new year with hope for more light and life. I wish that to everyone whose year has been a challenge as I pluck from John Donne these few lines that resonate with that hope:

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

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The Mystery in the Moon-lit Sky

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Photo by Lela Shook Paksoy
Photo by Lela Shook Paksoy

I’m partial to the moon. Not much of a surprise for those people who know me and I’m not unique in this partiality. I’ll never forget seeing the white orb for the first time through a telescope and being in awe of the fact that a heavenly body hung so seemingly close to where I stood that night. And I’m amazed by the dazzling full moons that sit just above the horizon, interrupting whatever thoughts are running through my head at that moment. The first novel I wrote had the title, Water from the Moon, borrowing a line from the movie, The Year of Living Dangerously—something you can never have. And if I see a moon on a book cover, I’m immediately drawn to it, which is why I put one on the cover of my first book.

 I notice this more in summer, but not exclusively. Just the other evening, after a string of bitter cold nights, I stood in my backyard and felt that something that’s almost indescribable. Or maybe it is describable. This is what I wrote from the perspective of my Wendy character in The Island of Lost Children:

 [Wendy] sensed old spirits pressed into the cracks of their brick walls as she passed them. And if she took her time and the night began to fall and the moon hung silver over them, something outside the world she lived in but not really frightening hovered near her. She didn’t need to look up to know it was there.

 Some nights, though, have a feature that doesn’t require a moon, a mystery more mysterious without its light. My grandparents lived in a place and at a time when light pollution wasn’t a consideration and when I was young, elementary age, I recall the mystery in that near-solid darkness. Objects around me appeared as the slightest silver, as if they drank up every bit of light from the stars, if they could be seen at all. That included all of us, my sister and cousin and I on the swing set, dipping and rising through the sea of evening. Something outside this world but not really frightening hovering nearby.

 I’m convinced that all fairy tales are born in those moments of pure darkness or those saturated with pure moonlight. All stories of danger and wonder and full of the fantastical.

 One last image I have of night that’s been in my head since I was very young: I’m standing in a neighborhood of brick houses looking down a street at a full moon. It is very late (or perhaps very, very early) and everything is tinged with moonlight. I’m not sure where that street leads and what that moon illuminates, but even though I suspect I’ll never know the answer for sure, I believe that’s the place where I’ll find all the stories I want to tell.

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